


"Send me your your co-ordinates" - Could Steve Rogers have saved himself on the Valkyrie?

by Aegir



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-17
Updated: 2016-04-17
Packaged: 2018-06-02 20:40:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6581344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aegir/pseuds/Aegir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A discussion of whether Steve could have sent Peggy his co-ordinates at the end of CA:TFA, and whether he could have been rescued if he had</p>
            </blockquote>





	"Send me your your co-ordinates" - Could Steve Rogers have saved himself on the Valkyrie?

This is a very small problem.

I keep seeing comments or references in fics and meta on how easily Steve could have saved himself in the _Valkyrie_.  Typically it starts with “He could have sent Peggy his co-ordinates…” and ends with his being rescued by Howard.  But would it really have been that simple?

Now if you simply want to write an AU in which Steve survives and gets to go home after the war then obviously it’s fine to take the shortest route to where you want.  However there is good reason to think the route to survival would have been nowhere near that easy, and there is plenty of room for a different style of AU – the epic struggle to stay alive in hostile conditions.  Plenty of room too for a canon Steve Rogers who honestly tried to survive, but ended up helpless and dying, his new body as powerless – so he thinks – as the old one would have been.  For the record I’m not trying to argue Steve Rogers would **never** give up on his own life.  I just don’t think **this** sequence provides evidence he did.  

The first question here: how would Steve Rogers have known his co-ordinates?  There was no satellite navigation in 1945, no GPS.  Peggy says to Steve, “Send me your co-ordinates”, but Peggy isn’t an aviator.  Establishing co-ordinates was, with normal 1945 technology, a good deal more difficult than she seems to think.

I say ‘with normal technology’ because HYDRA does have tech that didn’t exist in the real world.  That we can see a dial in the cockpit of the _Valkyrie_ that appears to be tracking the course in the manner of those little flight progress screens passengers get to watch in modern aircraft suggests they may have invented their own navigation technology.  However the screen is very small scale and wouldn’t give Steve more than a very general idea of where he was.  We can’t, as far as I can tell, see anything that gives obvious co-ordinates, and if there were any special HYDRA instruments exact co-ordinates could be derived from it’s not likely Steve would have known how to use them or even what to look for.  

Aerial navigation at this date was a highly skilled business, so skilled that large long distance bombers and transport planes carried dedicated navigators.  Commercial passenger planes carried a specialist crew member for navigation down to the 1970s.  There is no reason to think Steve Rogers was trained in aerial navigation.  Even if he was, how easy would navigating his position have been?

The first way of finding a position was ‘dead reckoning’, which was basically that knowing the direction you have been flying in and the speed you have been flying at allows you to calculate where you should have got to from your last certainly known position (in Steve’s case that would be the take off point).  Dead reckoning had drawbacks because there were factors, such as wind, that could throw the calculations out by a significant amount.  Flying over land it was possible to check position by looking for landmarks, but of course that wasn’t the case over the sea.

I think dead reckoning would have been a non-starter for Steve.  Even if he knew how to do it, and even if Red Skull had been keeping a log of the speed and direction he was flying that Steve would have been able to locate and understand; the plane had been lurching about a lot while Steve and Red Skull were fighting, which would obviously throw off any calculations Steve might try and make. 

The second method was celestial navigation: a complex series of calculations derived from the position of the sun or stars.  It required a set of instruments and tables, which would most likely not have been a problem as the Valkyrie might be expected to be carrying these, given it was making a trans-Atlantic flight.  However the method also needed a clear view of the sky.  With partial cloud cover a skilled navigator might get an approximate position.   If the sky was covered with cloud celestial navigation would be impossible. 

Even if Steve knew how to make the necessary calculations, which I think is very doubtful, and even if he was able get a clear enough view while flying though what seems to be light cloud, which is also doubtful; would he have been able to take the sightings?  Steve is flying a damaged and completely unfamiliar plane.  Not good circumstances under which to get sightings.  And even with clear skies celestial navigation still wasn’t pinpoint reliable, although more so than dead reckoning. 

Then there is a third method of calculating position: radio bearings.  I’m using the term loosely here, there are different forms of radio fix but there’s no need to go into that here.  The simpler form merely established what bearing the plane was on relative to the radio transmitter / receiver, this was helpful for a lost plane trying to find its home base as it established which course should be flown; but it was no good for fixing position as there was no judgement of distance, it only established a plane was somewhere along a straight line.  The more complicated method involved triangulating signals to fix a position.  This also wasn’t completely accurate at this period and of course it depended on a good radio signal.  It did however have the advantage that unlike other methods, a radio fix could be calculated by a receiving station, using radio signals from the plane.   This would probably have been Steve’s best chance of getting his co-ordinates.  It’s highly doubtful he could have calculated them himself, even if the plane had the equipment.  However it would have been possible to calculate his position from Red Skull’s base, **if** the base had the equipment, **if** there was somebody on the team who knew how to use it, and **if** his radio signal stayed strong enough for long enough.  That’s a lot of ifs.

A couple of real life stories help to illustrate the difficulties of accurate navigation in the world before GPS.  In 1937 Amelia Earhart set off from New Guinea headed for Howland, a small coral island in the Pacific which was to serve as a refueling stop on an intended round the world flight.  Earhart was the sole pilot, but was not expert in navigation and therefore took with her an additional crew member, Fred Noonan, solely for navigating.  Noonan had helped to pioneer aerial navigation, but even his expertise was not considered enough to guarantee finding Howland Island – ‘finding’ in this context of course meant determining exactly where the aircraft was so as to know what course to take over the last part of the leg.   The US Coast Guard Cutter _Itasca_ was therefore stationed at Howland Island with radio direction finding equipment and Earhart’s plane had also been fitted with such equipment. 

But when it came to the point the _Itasca_ never managed to establish a clear enough radio connection to take bearings.  Broken transmissions from Amelia Earhart were heard, and it seems she heard the _Itasca_ at least once , but no radio fix could be established.  One of messages read “We must be on you but cannot see you.”  Despite a very thorough and extensive search the plane and the two aviators were never found.  Steve Rogers would undoubtedly have followed the whole story in the papers of the time.

While Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan needed pinpoint accuracy, Flight 19 only needed to establish whether they were over the western Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico – and couldn’t even do that.  Flight 19 was a five plane training flight that took off from Florida in 1945.  At a point when they should have been over the Bahamas the pilots concluded they were lost, with Lt Taylor, the instructor, believing they were over the Florida Keys.  For pilots lost over the Atlantic standard advice was to head west until they hit land, but Taylor, believing he was not over the Atlantic, is known from radio transmissions to have led his flight mostly north and east. 

Flight 19 did not carry dedicated navigators; part of the purpose of the flight was to train pilots in navigating by dead reckoning, but as the entire question was whether they had gone badly off course dead reckoning was useless.  As with Amelia Earhart, difficulties in establishing sufficiently good radio contact caused problems in trying to establish a radio fix.  Eventually a fix was established on land, showing the planes were indeed over the Atlantic, but delays due to equipment failure meant the position was never transmitted to the lost planes.   Searches were made, although hindered by bad weather.  [1] They found nothing.  Despite Flight 19 appearing in numerous books and articles on the Bermuda Triangle as well as the film _Close Encounters of the Third Kind_ the problems weren’t extraordinary for pilots who had become disorientated.  The real mystery is how they became so disorientated in the first place.  In all probability Flight 19 was on course, or nearly so, when the pilots decided they were lost. 

Besides the strong probability that Steve would not have been in a position to establish accurate co-ordinates, it should be stressed all forms of navigational calculation would take time, which is something we know Steve felt he did not have.  Finally even if Steve did manage to calculate co-ordinates and then bail out, they probably still wouldn’t lead rescuers to an exact position.  If he fell in the sea currents would carry him away from the bail out point.  If he landed on pack ice: pack ice **drifts**.  It would only be if he came down on land – Greenland or the islands around Canada maybe – that his position would stay the same

If Steve did jump out what then?  We know Steve can survive falling quite long distances, especially if he’s over water, but it’s not clear if he knew that at the time, or how far he could fall.  Flying an unfamiliar plane it would not be easy for Steve to take it down to a low height and have time to jump out before the plane crashed.  However let us assume that either he did manage to do that or there were parachutes on board.  His problems would be far from over.

If Steve fell in the sea hypothermia would set in quickly.  Of course we know that Steve can survive indefinitely in a frozen state, but once again it’s not clear he did, more importantly if he lost consciousness without a life-jacket he would drown.  A regular person in Arctic waters would lose consciousness in about fifteen minutes, maybe sooner.  Steve may or may not have advanced resistance to hypothermia, but even if he does I think it unlikely he could stay conscious long enough for help to arrive.  If he could find a lifejacket he would stay afloat at least.  If he could find a liferaft, that would increase his chances of being sighted, a raft being easier to spot from the air than a human head. 

If he was sighted, rescue would still take time.  Planes lack the hover capacity necessary to winch people up from water.  Helicopters existed in 1945 but were fairly short range.  Almost certainly a sea-going vessel would have to be diverted.   Steve had better hope they can get to him before dehydration becomes too serious.  With his enhanced metabolism he may well dehydrate faster than a normal person.

If he landed on an ice-floe hypothermia would not set in as fast, depending on how warm his clothing was he might survive the temperatures for quite some time even without shelter.  Finding him though would not be easy, even if the team had managed to get hold of approximate co-ordinates.  Due to the dazzle effect, spotting a single person, or even a relatively large object, on ice is remarkably hard.  Search craft might fly right over Steve’s head and never see him at all. 

If he was sighted, how could he be rescued?  Landing a plane on ice and taking off again would have been possible with the technology of the time, though difficult and dangerous; however the ice would need to be thick enough to support a plane’s weight.  Alternatives would be a rescue party traveling on foot or by dog-sled possibly after being carried to the edge of the ice-floe by ship if there was no ice bridge to land from where he was.  This would obviously take time to organise and be potentially dangerous for the would be rescuers.  There is also the possibility of being rescued by icebreaker ship.  Now the best ice-breakers of the time were Soviet, and they were assigned to convoy duty during the war.  Getting one diverted would be by no means a given. 

Here another true story shows some of the problems any rescue attempt would face.  In 1928 the airship _Italia_ crashed in the Arctic returning from a flight over the North Pole.  The airship separated when it hit the ice, the control gondola broke off and the envelope (the inflated part) became airborne again and drifted away north with six men still on board.  The survivors from the gondola had the expertise and equipment to calculate and transmit reasonably accurate co-ordinates.   However even after the SOS signal had been picked up and the co-ordinates read, which took a remarkably long time, it was twelve days before a search plane sighted the main group of survivors.  Several times search planes had come within a mile, but failed to spot the survivors’ makeshift camp, even though the tent they were using had been daubed with red dye to make sighting it easier.  After the main group was finally located, air searches for three men who had tried to walk out over the ice went on for nearly three more weeks before two of them were sighted, nearly dead from starvation, on a drifting piece of ice.  One had to have a leg amputated due to frostbite.  The body of the third man, who had dropped out on the march, was never found; nor, despite searching, was any trace discovered of the airship’s envelope and the six men who had been still aboard when it separated from the gondola.

Rescuing the survivors was not easy, despite a major, if badly co-ordinated, international effort.  A light plane managed to take off the injured expedition leader Umberto Nobile (much against Nobile’s own wishes), but attempts to remove other survivors the same way were prevented by accident and bad weather, and finally made impossible due to the ice around the camp growing thinner.  The pilot who took off Nobile later crashed and had to be rescued himself, as did the crew of the plane which had spotted the two men on the drifting ice-floe, and a team of three men who had tried to reach the survivors by dog-sled.  Another would-be rescue plane simply disappeared, with six men on board including renowned explorer Roald Amundsen who had led the first team to reach the South Pole.  Finally the remaining seven _Italia_ survivors, including the two who had tried to walk out over the ice, were rescued by the Soviet ice-breaker _Krassin_ nearly seven weeks after the _Italia_ crashed. 

Now almost forgotten, the story of the _Italia_ was a sensation at the time, including in the US.  Steve Rogers would most likely have known it, and been well aware of just how difficult finding and saving him if he bailed out might be.  Granted technology had improved since 1928, but not so much as to make Arctic rescue easy. 

Also worth mentioning here is the twelve part _Buck Rogers_ serial film which came out in 1939.  Buck Rogers was a Man Out of Time long before Captain America, indeed I wonder if he may have been an influence on the 60’s Captain America reboot/retcon.   The original pulp fiction / comic strip Buck Rogers was put into a state of suspended animation accidentally after inhaling radioactive gas in a coal mine, waking up in the 25 th century.  However for the movie serial this was changed, so Buck Rogers and a teenaged sidekick character called Buddy Wade are making an airship flight over the Arctic when they are forced to crash land by a storm.  When the scientists back at base ask, “What’s your exact position,” Buck reports “Can’t say within about 300 miles, sir, on account of drift.”  Baling out is considered ill-advised by Buck who tries in vain to dissuade two redshirt characters from doing so, exclaiming of one, “He’ll freeze to death before he lands.”  Clearly he views an emergency landing as their best chance, but the scientists at base are well aware of the potential difficulties of Arctic rescue.  One of them has therefore equipped the airship with a gas intended to put people into suspended animation, explaining  “If they were forced down in some inaccessible spot I hoped it would sustain their lives until relief ships could rescue them.”  When the airship crash lands ice cascades down in a manner which – making allowance for low budget 30s special effects – is very similar to the end of _The First Avenger_ , even to the point of the radio suddenly falling silent.

Of course all of this was fiction, but reflected public awareness that Arctic rescue could be far from quick or easy – the similarities with the story of the _Italia_ are surely not coincidence.  I expect Steve and Bucky would have seen the movie serial, they probably made Buck Rogers jokes at each other all the time. 

I think the decision Steve made probably gave him as good a chance of survival as anything would, given that he’d rejected trying to land on the North American continent.   Landing the plane on the ice carried three major risks: that it would explode on landing, that it would crash land and fatally injure Steve, and that it would go through the ice.  However if he could put it down successfully he would have shelter and, crucially, a large object like the _Valkyrie_ , would be much easier to spot than a lone human.  There was even a chance the radio would keep working, allowing a radio fix of his position to be made.  It wasn’t a very good chance of surviving, but nothing would have been.  In the event he put the plane down safely, but the radio cut out and the ice failed to hold. 

Do we know just when the ice gave?  In _The Avengers_ when we see Steve being thawed out he is lying prone, so they didn’t find him in the pilot’s seat.  How long was he awake in the plane, before it went through the ice?  Did he try to work the radio?  Did he try and fail to get out?  Did he choose to stay aboard, preferring the risk of the ice going to abandoning his only shelter?  There’s a lot to work with here, if you like giving Steve traumatic experiences.

There’s also a lot of possibilities with regard to rescue missions.  It could be done canon compliant: with someone at Red Skull’s base managing to get a radio fix on Steve’s location just before the radio cuts out, followed by Peggy and Howard desperately organising searches but never finding the wreck.  Or it could be done AU: a story of Steve surviving in the wreck of the _Valkyrie_ , struggling to get the radio working, scouring the plane for rations, constantly in dread of the ice giving out beneath him, whilst his friends fight to put a mission together to save him, ending in dramatic rescue. 

To sum up: Steve probably couldn’t have sent Peggy his co-ordinates, and even if he could it’s quite likely it would not have done him any good.  There’s plenty of mileage in stories about Steve with a death wish, but plenty of it also in stories about a Steve who didn’t have one but was genuinely out of decent options. 

 

[1]  One of the search planes was also lost which contributed to the later legend of Flight 19; although it’s not quite true to say the search plane ‘disappeared’, as a nearby ship witnessed it explode in mid-air.  This type of plane was known to be prone to fuel leaks, a random spark or a crew member smoking could have caused the tragedy.

**Sources**

I used a number of sources for this, but the key ones were:

Ralph Barker, _Great Mysteries of the Air_

Lawrence Kusche, _The Bermuda Triangle Mystery - Solved_

Alexander McKee, _Great Mysteries of Aviation_

The _Buck Rogers_ serial can be seen on YouTube


End file.
